A novel mobile GPU architecture based on ray tracing

Recently, with the increasing demand for photorealistic graphics and the rapid advances in desktop CPUs/GPUs, real-time ray tracing has attracted considerable attention. Unfortunately, ray tracing in the current mobile environment is difficult because of inadequate computing power, memory bandwidth, and flexibility in mobile GPUs. In this paper, we present a novel mobile GPU architecture called the SGRT (Samsung reconfigurable GPU based on Ray Tracing) with the following features: 1) a fast compact hardware engine that accelerates a traversal and intersection operation, 2) a flexible reconfigurable processor that supports software ray generation and shading, and 3) a parallelization framework that achieves scalable performance. Experimental results show that the SGRT can be a versatile graphics solution, as it supports compatible performance compared to desktop GPU ray tracers.